


Maelstrom

by MnemonicMadness



Series: Tony & Mantis [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (he gives one instead), Character Study, Depression, Emotional Hurt, Empathy, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, POV Mantis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, can be read as stand alone but the first part is short so...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-18 22:23:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12397458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MnemonicMadness/pseuds/MnemonicMadness
Summary: When she meets his eyes, she knows his armour is cracking. She knows she shouldn't touch him, knows that it will be even worse than when he feels nothing. But there's no fighting her instinct.





	Maelstrom

The tower is one of the few buildings that still has electricity, but by now it occupants have turned off all the lights to find rest and she doesn't turn them back on. The city outside isn't brightly lit as she's come to be used to, it won't be again for weeks, not until all the damage is repaired. But it isn't completely dark either. There are lights in the distance where the hospitals are, ambulances restlessly driving to and from them, flashing bright blue, and the bright white search lights of the flying vessels – helicopters, Peter said – and the larger vehicles that can pass through the debris blocking the way for the ambulances move slowly but unstoppably towards even the darkest parts.

When she looks more closely, she can see the much smaller lights of torches, carried by individual people on foot. They sprinkle the streets in every last corner, looking like someone had stolen the stars from the sky and poured them out to give hope to the injured against the pitch-black backdrop. Except, unlike the stars they aren't stationary, aren't distantly guiding the way. They are dancing across the wounded landscape, reaching out to those in need.

A delicate, exhausted smile pulls on her lips. Mere hours have passed since they finally won the battle, and already countless people are pouring out onto the streets to help one another, so many that it seems like even the busiest nights before haven't been nearly as bustling, as _alive_. It makes for a picture that is almost soothing in its hopefulness.

However, it does nothing to sooth the strange restlessness that has taken a hold of her, reaching deeper even than her exhaustion. From somewhere – the tower may still be standing unlike so many others, but it hasn't escaped unscathed, it is riddled with damage and broken windows – the whistling noise of wind sings to her, carrying a bitter note of the smoke that dims the view in the distance.

She'll go out, she decides even as her bruised body aches with every step when she turns away from the window. She isn't strong and has no knowledge of medicine, she can't dig people out of the rubble or fix their bodies, but that doesn't mean she cannot help. What she can do is keep them calm, ease their pain for a while and take the fear she knows they all must be feeling despite the relief that the fight is over. Because while there is no more alien fire raining from the sky, the next fight, the one to save as many people as possible in the aftermath, is only at its very beginning.

The tower looks different in the dark. Despite the wind and the noise entering unhindered through the broken windows, it seems more silent than usually, almost abandoned and lonely. It reminds her of wandering through Ego's structures when he was busy, leaving her all alone, knowing there was life surrounding her but not quite feeling it.

She has almost reached the elevator when she sees the light. It's faint, just the slightest hue of it reflected on the corridor's wall panelling, but it's enough to draw her attention and curiosity. With everyone being at the very least equally exhausted as she feels and having gone to their respective rooms hours ago, she thought them all to be long asleep by now. She hesitates only for a moment before turning away from the elevator and following the corridors to the source of the light.

Somehow, she finds herself unsurprised when she arrives at one of the laboratories and finds it brightly illuminated behind the still intact glass panelling separating it from the hallway. In the centre of the room stands Tony and that is a surprise – not his presence, that she expected, but him just standing there, back turned towards her, hands empty aside from a liquor bottle. Normally, a halo of bright blue holograms would surround him, or he'd be crouched over a piece of metal or a sheet of calculations, hands busy gesturing or scribbling or fixing, always improving and fixing something. As short a time as she has spent here, it's a picture that has become so familiar that seeing his hands just hang there, still except for the slightest tremor, feels so wrong it aches.

He looks small, like this, in the cluttered, too bright room. He isn't much taller than her, but he has a certain presence that makes him seem taller, larger than life. It's there when he walks into a room or when he shifted during one of the strategy meetings they held before the fighting began, something that silences everyone else who is present and draws their attention within seconds. The others say it's his massive ego, but it always seemed like just another of his masks to her.

Now though, now he looks as if he's hiding, shoulders drawn in tight and head lowered, unmoving as not to draw the eye. Then his whole body twitches in a shudder and she reaches for the door and finds it locked.

It takes her a moment to find the blinking red light of the camera on the ceiling – she isn't often in this part of the building, no one is, there is an unspoken consensus that it's _Tony's_ – and smiles in a way she hopes is polite. Drax says she is getting less awful at smiling, but she's not good at it yet either.

“Hello FRIDAY.”

“Evenin'. How can I help you, Ms Mantis?” the voice from the ceiling answers. It still seems somewhat strange to her, to speak to someone and hear their emotions in their voice, but not be able to reach out and feel them, to not sense them in the way she does others. Nonetheless, she likes FRIDAY with her frank honesty and genuine niceness.

“Can you open the door for me?”

For a long moment, only the wind and the distant clatter of the helicopters breaks the silence as FRIDAY doesn't reply. Maybe she did the smiling wrong again, she thinks.

“I don't know. I'm not sure the boss would like that.”

“Oh.” That probably means she should leave, yet she can't quite bring herself to. Something is wrong with Tony, – more wrong than usual, she will never forget the one and only time she touched him, will never forget the _Nothing_ she felt – that is as glaringly visible as the lights and her instincts are telling her to go to him, that he needs her help. That he needs it perhaps even more than the strangers outside. She is still torn when she hears the soft, mechanical whirring and the click of the lock just barely over the wind.

FRIDAY's voice is soft and concerned. “But I _am_ sure that he shouldn't be alone right now.”

She barely remembers to whisper her gratitude as she carefully slides the door open and walks inside, focussing on keeping her steps light and soundless. As she gets closer, she sees that it's not just his hands that are trembling. The tremors run through his entire body, making his shoulders hitch, and she hears his breath huffing too fast and shallow. For a moment, she almost fears that he is crying, but when he finally heard her approach and whirls around to face her, his eyes are dry.

His eyes... Within a split second of meeting his gaze she sees, realises what's wrong and a shiver of fear runs down her spine – stronger than worry, fear for him. With it comes the knowledge of what she has to do, or perhaps just what she is going to do. For as long as she has known him, his eyes always have the exact same look in them, an emptiness that is the only thing betraying the otherwise perfect masks he wears.

But now... Now they are anything _but_ empty. They are wide open and vulnerable and she can see the armour of emptiness he wears around his broken heart crack, can see the fissures forming, permeating it like electricity eating its way through wood. His face is blank, devoid of any masks and left nearly expressionless as if unsure without them. The hairline fractures in the void widen and become cracks, ragged holes with sharp edges.

She knows she shouldn't, knows it's dangerous. She has known it the moment she had felt the suffocating silence inside him on that day on the balcony weeks ago. Knows that whatever lies behind the protective mantle of Nothing is vastly has to be vastly more damaging for the void to become something protective in comparison.

Just like she has known since that moment what she will do if she should find herself in the situation she is now confronted with and that what she knows she will inevitably do is the reason she has hoped to be able to avoid it. But there's no fighting her instinct, bone deep, written in her very DNA.

She reaches out, even more quickly than last time, catches his bare arm even as he stumbles back a step to avoid it. The remainder of the dam breaks the fraction of a second after her skin touches his and her last coherent thought is that she was right in her assumption that even the suffocating void would have been better than _this_.

She isn't suffocating this time. She is _drowning_. Where there was silence, now a maelstrom of emotion takes hold of her mind and heart and drags her under, relentless and merciless.

It hurts. Oh, it _hurts_.

It's more than just pain, although the pain and loss and heartbreak and loneliness alone already feel as if she has been hollowed out and filled with molten lead. There is the sharp sting of betrayal after betrayal, the unwilling but instinctive mistrust that has grown like scar tissue from it. There is fear, the constant, irrational feeling of threat, exhausting hypervigilance, fear that might shift into a panic attack at any moment, at the slightest trigger. Attached to it is anger and shame, so much shame at the perceived weakness and the helplessness when faced with it. She wants to claw at the weakness, rip it out and cauterise the wound, burn away every trace of it.

The guilt feels like acid, strong and reeking, eating its way through everything. It feels like a rip current, grabbing hold of her and pulling her deeper, burning and ice cold at once.

But all of those things seem downright bearable compared to the sheer _loathing_. It draws strength from the shame and the self-directed anger. It whispers that each betrayal was earned and deserved, each heartbeat feels like broken shards of glass scratching on the inside of the ribcage and the loathing murmurs that the pain of it isn't nearly enough. The loathing is so strong that its edges have become disgust and she is distantly aware of nausea rising in her.

She is drowning and the loathing is digging sharp claws into her mind, ripping it apart and she feels each metaphorical filament tear, one by one. Her ribs feel too tight, the guilt wrapping tightly around them to prevent her from drawing in the air that she's sure is far beyond her reach already. She isn't lost the way she was in the silence, at least in it she had still been herself. She is missing pieces of herself, torn to shreds and lost in the torrents and surely she must have bled out by now.

On some distant level of consciousness she feels fingers covered in latex gloves prying her own loose until she can finally _breathe_. Free from the vicious claws and merciless currents, she becomes fully aware of the nausea it it only takes a few seconds until she falls to her knees, heaving.

One gloved hand gathers her hair to hold it away from her face as she throws up, while the other rubs slow, soothing circles on her back.

“Shhh, it's okay. You're okay. I'm so sorry you had to feel that. You're okay now.” Tony's voice starts filtering in as her heaving transitions into sobs hard enough to rattle her chest almost painfully. She hears him step away and moments later, he wraps a thick, warm blanket around her shaking body. His arms follow, holding her carefully and rocking her gently back and forth, like she has seen people on the street do a few times when their children are hurt. She remembers wondering at it. Now she knows how very comforting it is.

She hears Tony say “It's alright.” and that makes her forcefully shake off the worst of the aftershocks.

“It's not alright!” His flinch makes her reconsider her words and curse how much she has yet to learn about social interaction. “ _You're_ not alright.”

This time he swallows before a small, self-depreciating smile warps his mouth, eyes still pained and vulnerable. “No, I'm not.” he admits quietly, as if it's shameful, as if it's not allowed.

Already she can see him rebuilding his armour of emptiness, covering the maelstrom piece by piece, locking it away. For a moment she is overwhelmed with awe at his strength, she couldn't withstand a mere glimpse of his pain let alone help him, yet he is comforting her while rebuilding his defences, capable of holding the maelstrom at bay.

She goes willingly when he coaxes her upright. “Come on, I've got a couch to crash on in here. You look worse than I feel. No offence.”

It's a relief to lower herself onto the semi-soft piece of furniture, she is still shaking and her legs seem to threaten to give out from under her at any moment. When he steps back, an acute flash of remembered loneliness races through her and she reaches out to stop him, luckily reconsidering before she touched him again. He understand anyway and after a moment of hesitation, sits down on the free space beside her head, asking FRIDAY to dim the lights and DUM-E and Butterfingers to clean up the puddle of sick she had left.

They both watch the robots in silence, until he softly begins humming a simple melody. She can't remember either Peter not him playing it on their music devices, but it is nice, almost as comforting as the rocking was. Exhaustion quickly catches up to her.

“I'm sorry.” she tells him, voice already dragging with fatigue. “I wanted to help you, and I just...”

“Shh, Mother Teresa, it's okay. You did help.”

She wants to ask whose mother he's speaking of and how she helped, but sleep has already begun taking hold of her, aided by Tony's humming and the way he slowly caresses her hair. She falls asleep to the sight of him, gaze hollow and smile kind.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you liked it? Comments are my lifeblood so I'd be absolutely thrilled if you leave one!


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